Good Day. My toolkit is lean and serious this year, and at the centre of it sits jQuery, running on a Hostgator server. It lets me do things on the fly that feel close to magic, reaching for pre-built modules instead of writing and designing every component by hand, moving at a pace that makes me feel briefly invincible.
And yet that same speed has started to unsettle me, because I notice I know a little less about my own code than I used to. The moment jQuery arrived, a dozen libraries followed it, and I find myself reading more documentation, learning more syntax, forever. It is like trying to learn thirty languages at once, living in thirty countries in a single month, waking each day in a different tongue and spending it just working out what everyone is saying.
That is a real challenge, and overcoming it daily is its own skill. It has pushed me toward a more agile, more mindful way of working, and toward an honest question I now ask of every tool. Not is this clever, but is this what the client actually needs.
I never stopped hand coding, and I do miss the challenge of building a thing from the ground up. It is the difference between digging the hole and pouring the foundation yourself, and having a single Lego brick arrive that simply is the foundation. The brick is there for you, and it saves you, but you lose the quiet satisfaction of the labour that used to come first.
The trade-off, though, is real and worth it. Letting the tools carry the repetitive parts lets me put my attention where it matters. And it is teaching me a lesson I suspect I will need for the rest of my career.
Tools are always changing. The skill is not mastering any one of them forever. It is learning to integrate with whatever arrives next, to hold loosely to the syntax and tightly to the judgment, and to keep asking, through every new library and every new fashion, what the work in front of me truly requires.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · February 2008